Sunday, January 22, 2012

Bilingualism in my family part 2

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Marriage is also a factor to be bilingual (and/or multilingual) in both my dad and mum's families. On my paternal side, my dad has a sister-in-law who originates from Singapore and a brother-in-law who is a convert from Iban family while from my maternal side, my mother has a brother married to an Indonesian woman. These addition to our family brings along their mother tongue language into effect (although not imposing on us to be good at Singapore Malay, Iban and Indonesian respectively) but we have the advantage to learn too! So for these aunties and uncles of mine, being bilingual or multi is expected when they married into a family who does not speak their born language. Occasionally, we tend to be influenced by the accent and tone of speech whenever these individuals converse with us e.g. my Singaporean auntie will have this sentence to ask "Alaaa...kenapa lambat? Tadi siapa drive? Bapak atau Huzairie?" - "Why so late? Who was driving? Your father or Huzairie?" This may look typical of any Brunei Malay conversation but it sounds different because my auntie has her own Singaporean accent and I admit, my sisters and I especially often find ourselves speaking in slight Singapore Malay accent too! 


With knowledge and acquisition in both Malay (Standard, Brunei and Sarawak) as well as English, this has also affected our communication in the virtual world aka Facebook, Twitter and SMS. As many other families out there, mine is not excluded from doing code-switching in the mentioned medium of communication. Mass media also helped in the mastering of other foreign languages such as Tagalog, Hindi, Korean and Cantonese to name a few and interestingly, I can communicate with my family in these languages! Not 100% fluent but on the acceptable level. 


I guess I should stop here before I bore you with more of my story on my family and our use of bili/multilingualism. Hope there are some academic values in the posts I am sharing (: Will try to improve as the time goes by!




Love Love Love
Zyra A.  


        


   

2 comments:

  1. What does Singapore Malay sound like? How is it different from Standard Malay in Brunei?

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  2. Hello Sir! (:

    Singapore Malay and Standard Malay are pretty much the same. From my experience having a Singaporean-Malay auntie, her accent and tone are noticeably different from what I usually hear spoken by Standard Malay speakers. The use of Standard Malay in Brunei is mostly influenced by Malaysian accent I suppose, but for Singaporean I just feel it's slightly different. The words they use are basically the same for Singapore and St. Malay, just the way they speak is different. My personal thought (:

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